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I built my first desktop

03-31-2026

First attempts started in summer of last year. A number of parts were ordered second hand, and maybe half showed up functional.
I learned a lot, but the most important being to never buy expensive delicate things online without a return policy. It doesn't matter how trustworthy the seller seems.

First I'll list parts that went into this with any anecdotes I happen to think of, then summarize how the parts came together at the end. Skip the text in black if you're only interested in the pictures and the part list. _{*Pictures of parts taken from search results and edited.}

The parts

Case: Corsair Vengeance Series C70 Military Green

I'm a fan of the earthy tones found in army tones and patterns, and I like how often it's applied to the silhouette of things built rugged or strong. I happened on this case in particular by happenstance browsing cases for my motherboard, and I was immediately delighted by this rectangular prism ammo-box lookin thing. I put a bid on it the same hour I found it. I won the auction for a steal, no doubt because of the white splats I can only assume is paint.
Once it shipped, it got dropped off at a local craft store across town when the postman took a look at the neighborhood I was living in. I don't have a car, so I ended up dragging it home, but only 2 days after the email came saying it shipped. Somehow, that email came early, which I still find very odd.

Looking at pictures of the case, I imagined the power button having a fuller kerklunk sound. It didn't and I was mildly disappointed by the light click, but I was having fun with the spring loaded cover over the reset button as I was troubleshooting my bootloader. I was more disappointed finding there were no screws between this and the secondhand motherboard I got, though, the hardware store just happened to carry 6 32 3/4" machine screws that fit the AM4 form factor perfectly.

PSU: be quiet! PURE POWER 12M L12-M-850W

This is one of few parts I didn't cheap out on. As the brick eating power from my wall and spitting it into my expensive delicate electronics, I didn't want to leave that job to the lowest bidder.

Motherboard: MSI Pro B550M-VC Wifi

I spent days troubleshooting this months ago. I got it "Certified Refurbished" on ebay.com. I wasn't expecting perfect quality, but "functional" at least should be reasonable. It was sent to MSI for repairs several times, and every single time, it was sent back in the same packaging with a note stating:
Repair: OK
I don't know if anything was actually done with it, or whether it was tested. I couldn't get any details whatsoever about the repair service or what they do.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

Funny thing, I went from 0 processing units to 3 by the time I finished this project. Turned out all 3 work as I isolated the problem to the motherboard itself.

CPU Cooler: AMD Wraith Stealth

My first mounting job was terrible. One screw failed to install at all, completely negating the thermal paste, and causing my computer to freeze and burn a hole in my floor as it tried to compile librewolf from source.

Thermal Paste: Corsair XTM50

There's not much to say, it's thermal interface. No cool/funny stories, besides it showed up with the cooler for free. I squirted the metal paste and it infact enhanced thermal conductivity between the cooler and the CPU.

Graphics Card: ASUS HD 7850 DirectCU II

I bought this thing years ago at a Wells Fargo parking lot for $45. The original reason was to play Zoo Tycoon. Without it, Windows XP would complain about the integrated GPU for some unknown reason. It worked without the graphics card, but I would get warnings constantly.
Besides the one fan that doesn't spin, it functions fairly well, especially given the huge markdown.

RAM: Gigastone Game Pro DDR4 8GBx2

These were bought a day after the rest of the parts arrived, when I realized I didn't have any DDR4 RAM. They were brand new, and yet the motherboard I was troubleshooting would not stop lighting up its DRAM EZ Debug Light every single time I booted the thing, no matter the arrangement of the sticks. It wasn't until a friend lent me 4 of his own that I found these were not the reason nothing worked last summer.

Storage Drive 0: Western Digital WD3200AAJS

I have zero memory where this drive is from. It's existed as long as time. I dropped it hard on the ground on a groggy morning where it incurred zero damage, which, I think, is a nice upside to my case forcing me to work with these larger form drives. My smaller compact drives definitely would have hurt its head assembly.

Storage Drive 1: Western Digital WD1001FALS

An older model of hard drive I got for $15 at a different Wells Fargo parking lot. Mine features an Apple logo on the sticker when it was harvested from a dead macbook.
The RPM isn't fantastic by current standards. The read/write speed is fairly slow, but it could be a lot slower and $15 would still be a steal for 1TB of storage space.

Operating System: Arch Linux

If you don't know, Arch linux is an operating system that is useless out of the box. The point is to populate it with software of your choice primarily from the arch linux repositories. It's fairly easy and gives control freaks like me maximum control with *minimal hassle.
_{*Minimal, assuming you're comfortable in the weeds of the average desktop system.}

Putting it together

As I was putting these parts together, I was surprised how well it aesthetically went. While I did consistently avoid RGB lights because I think they're obnoxious, I wasn't putting too much thought in the visual consistency. I had no plans on putting its guts on display, but I have to say I'm happy with how it turned out.

One of the perks to keeping my consumption to a small palette of colors out of habit. The red SATA cables and fan trim in particular I really like against the black and earthy green. I do wish the front plate of the graphics card faced the other way. As pictured above, I think it would have added to the look.
This is actually my very first time managing cables like this. Before I always worked with laptops and valued mobility too much to bother with organizing any cables. After all why manage cables when they're going to be moving, coming and going constantly?

This was a lot of fun. I'll make time to do more of this with the bits and pieces and old machines I have lying around half-gutted. If I do, There's a good chance it'll be posted here.

Learning to be a webmaster

03-27-2026

The first HTML I wrote was in high school. What I wrote back then was impressively bad, and there was one incident that put this on full display. I wanted borders, and how I decided to accomplish that was to carefully surround an element with no less than four divs all carefully sized and positioned to achieve the effect.

Obviously I've come a long way in my front end design, and with no small amount of help from 3 books in particular:

I can't overstate how helpful these books are. Details may be left out at times, but, with a web search, the knowledge holes are quickly filled. It may be worthwhile to look at later editions of these books.

I wanna talk about the programs I use to make this site happen.

Planning turned out to be very important

As with any project with a lot of moving (or even static) parts, starting with an abstracted plan saves a lot of time wasted screwing up or making functional changes. My planning was simple with pen and paper, followed by drawing a mockup with krita. Any paint program works, just pick your favorite.
This site went through a dozen iterations before landing on a color scheme and layout I was happy with.

This site was hand-written in vim with love

Vim is what I use to write anything that's not GdScript. There's nothing wrong with using notepad++ or whatever else, even Microsoft Notepad.

Admittedly, I don't know a lot to make full use of vim. There is a chance that contributes to why versions of this site take so long to push out.
_{It definitely does}

Firefox has a million tools for learning

Go to a site and start poking at its source. Hit F12 and start exploring. It's actually a lot of fun seeing how websites tick.
If you're interested in a part in particular, then left click it and hit Inspect. Left click and hit View Page Source to see the whole .html file in another tab.
Besides that, they have docs that helped me quite a bit.

Before I'm accused of any mozilla zealotry, I'd be the first to admit they have issues like any other. In fact I'm not using base Firefox. I'm using a modifed version called Librewolf.
Other browsers may have these functions too, but that's for their users to figure out

These assets aren't mine, or most are not.

The font for example is home-brewed after a couple hours learning how Font Forge works with zero prior knowledge of what a font is. I had the abstract idea it's a file telling programs how a character should be drawn, but nothing more. That said, I'm aware my font needs work.

Most images featured are textures pulled from repositories around the internet:

Texturecan with all its repository contents made available under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universe License.
Background camoflauge image in particular is from FreeCreatives. The legality of using assets found here is unclear. Their "About" page will not load, nor will the "Contact Us" page. If this image is your property, please email me before sueing me, I'll be more than happy to stop using it.

Those social media icons however are all me, though. The arrows too.

I do check my email

I know a lot of webmasters have abandoned their projects, or take long breaks but don't worry, I check my inbox almost everyday. There was a time I didn't and I regret it.

Made in Cascadia